Dr. Know: PPS Property Problem

Portland Public Schools owns so many vacant
properties—why don’t they sell some off? Or at least lease them out to
raise funds for the repairs and upgrades that they seek?

—Cynthia V.

Ah, Cynthia, you poor, sweet, naive creature. You remind
me of a child asking why Daddy can’t just drive to Heaven and bring
Grandma back home in a garbage bag.

If
only it were that simple. Here’s the problem: the Portland Public
Schools properties are, by definition, public. That means we all have a
say in what happens to them. And just as soon as we bring every local
business group, neighborhood association, and land-use-planning board
into perfect agreement about exactly how to dispose of these sites, we
are totally gonna do what you just suggested. Or something else just as
cool!

Take Washington High,
for example. Closed to students in 1981, this plum parcel on Southeast
12th Avenue and Stark Street was designated as “surplus” by PPS in 2002,
and it seems like there’s been a community meeting about what to do
with it once a month ever since, with no real end in sight.

Sell it to
developers? Too commercial! Make it a community center? Too expensive!
Turn it into an adult-themed amusement park where you can get artisan
hand jobs while riding in a hot-air balloon shaped like a giant boob?
Too…um...OK, no one’s proposed that last one except me, but I still
think it’d be pretty boss.

In the grand scheme
of things, the powers that be are doing what you suggest. They’re just
doing it so slowly as to be undetectable on human time scales. It’s like
this one time when I was super baked, and I was like, “Dude, what if
the universe exploded?” And my friend was all, “Dude: It is exploding!”
Whoa.

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

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